Work authority
The second lock
The relation is one lock: on the record's physics, the only key that fits it is a new GPU-class die that takes about thirty months and tens of millions to cut, and opens the door only about 2.6 times more easily than the card everyone holds. Igneum does not change that lock again. It puts a second lock on the room behind the door: hashing earns; the selected key signs.
Work authority is the rule that puts block authority on a bond. Proof of work determines share-lane rewards. Bonded draw units select signers where units are occupied; the open-seat proof-of-work rule supplies liveness while units remain empty. Anyone with a supported GPU may submit valid shares without posting a bond and is paid according to accepted work; a qualifying bond receives draw units under the published allocation rule and becomes eligible to sign when one of those units is selected. An unbonded share worker cannot alter the signed template without invalidating its work; the selected bonded key supplies the block seal. What a block contains, where its reward goes and which parent it extends rest with the bonded key that signed the template, and a bond is per key and cannot be transferred on the chain; no verified person, company or supplier stands behind a key in the protocol. The seal is cryptographically bound to participation by the bonded secret. Whether remote sealing, co-located appliances, collateral contracts or holder-operated services can transfer effective signing authority is unresolved and is tested by Guard C1. The chain is labelled hybrid proof of work and bonded capital from block one.
State: in closure
On the morning of 11 October 2026 the project decided that work authority is a genesis rule, live from block one with its parameters frozen, and that it must be security-closed before genesis. The auditor's condition, in its words: "If guard (c) is required for the launch claim, it must be security-closed and live at genesis. Frozen parameters alone do not establish that the mechanism works."
Today the rule is a prototype: prototype mechanics agree on two node pairs, and the three security closure rows remain open. In the auditor's words it "proves mechanics, while its outsourcing and Sybil resistance remain unproved." It counts as launch containment only once the closure rows read prevented and the auditor verifies them. There is no launch before that. This page says "in closure" until the auditor's verification reads passed.
What is proven today, and on what
On two pairs of development nodes, with one node of each pair built independently from a different toolchain, all labelled prototype:
- every keyed-proof refusal (a forged signature, a time floor, an ineligible round, the unbonded round misused, a wrong payout list) refused on both nodes;
- the draw over bond units and the epoch seed, and the fork weight by round, read as the tip rule after the fact;
- the payout list paid exactly, pro rata by weight, by the chain itself;
- liveness with every bonded sealer dark (the unbonded round seals);
- key rotation under the bond, effective at the next block;
- two independent builds agreeing on every block; 200 invalid keyed blocks refused at 13.6 ms each;
- a fresh node reproducing the chain from genesis past an epoch change;
- the non-custodial pool: a pool that hashed nothing, signed nothing and held no key, bond or payout set the payout list on the sealer from the members' signed shares, refused every template that did not carry it, and the chain paid the members exactly; every accepted share answered with a signed receipt the member verifies alone.
What that proves, in the auditor's relabel: "attribution, receipts and direct payout mechanics, not non-outsourceability or specialist containment. Alternative payout lists and withholding remain detectable, not prevented."
The closure rows: the launch gates
| row | what must be shown | where it is read | state |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1, outsourcing resistance | under the hostile-key binding, a holder cannot hand a specialist the use of its bond without handing it the bond: the disclosure, collateral, remote-key-service and co-located-box routes each priced on the dev chain, with the collateral route at or above the bond's value. The weak form (the key in the seal hash alone) is known to fail this row, so the keyed rounds are in the genesis rule or there is no launch | the red team's register on the dev chain | pending |
| C2, Sybil attribution | the measured share per key under one party running many keys, and under one party hashing for many holders' templates, against the party's true share: what attribution sees, what it misses, with the miss stated as a number; the early-concentration guard exercised in the thin period | security's suite on the dev chain; the thirty-day diagnostic as the instrument | pending |
| C3, pool-mediated control | a pool holding no key cannot change a template, redirect a reward, seal where no member is drawn, or gain eligibility by hardware; a pool holding members' keys is measured for what it then controls, which the chain sees as one holder with many units | the pool on the dev chain; security's refusal rows; the pool's published member list | pending |
Each row reads PREVENTED, DETECTED or OPEN against its attack. A row that reads OPEN or DETECTED where the condition needs PREVENTED fails the gate.
The five launch gates, every one on the record before a genesis date is fixed:
| gate | what must be shown | state |
|---|---|---|
| L1 | C1, C2 and C3 read pass on decision-grade rows and the auditor has verified them | pending |
| L2 | two independently built nodes agree on every block from height 0 across at least three lottery epochs under the genesis form: the empty table, the earliest bonds entering, the thin-period clock, the floor reached, a hostile claim, an equivocation, a rotation, the payout list, with zero refused valid work and every invalid keyed block refused | pending |
| L3 | a node started from genesis with no state syncs through the same, in the default pruning mode, and reaches the same head | pending |
| L4 | the rule's vectors frozen for every gate point and the genesis form; node and miner support in the launch binaries, reproducible on two builders; the parity row on the production worker under the keyed form | pending |
| L5 | the keyed form costs at or under 5 percent of the hash's energy at two keyed rounds on the measured 5090 bundle, with the AMD and Apple rows inside their vendor-relative loss; a failed L5 is no launch, since the weak form cannot pass C1 | pending |
The frozen parameters
Frozen means: these values enter the launch document and the genesis fields; a change after launch is a new ratified row under the selection contract, never an edit.
| parameter | frozen value |
|---|---|
| the entry the figures are read at | 12 months, 1,576,800 blocks at the 20-second block (frozen on 11 October 2026; the earlier 2,102,400-block figure was its 15-second form) |
| the bond's floor | 16 percent of the issuance to date at the epoch's snapshot (whether 16 percent is actually bonded is an outcome the chain measures, never a rule it enforces) |
| the unit | the larger of the bond and the floor, divided by 2^16; a ticket is never priced under the floor |
| the cap per beneficiary key | one quarter of the larger of the bond and the floor, plus 1 percent slack; per key, and evadable by keys, stated |
| the lock | through the entry: a bond posted in an entry releases no earlier than that entry's retirement plus one activation window |
| the exit rule | the exit address is set in the bond transaction; a hostile claim (the bond's secret presented with any other address) pays the balance at once less one quarter burnt and removes the key; for proven equivocation the design specifies a bond penalty (one half burnt, one block's reward to the reporter, the key removed); its consensus implementation is a launch gate, and the exact condition is served only once that transaction and its regression row have passed |
| the draw's epoch | 4,320 blocks (one day at the 20-second block); the snapshot two epochs back; the seed the last 1,024 canonical block hashes of that epoch, the genesis hash alone for epochs 0 and 1 |
| the rounds | 20 s per round, 16 rounds, then an unbonded round any signer may seal; expected added delay about 10.6 s per block, absorbed by the difficulty rule |
| the difficulty floor | one 3060-class card's 20 s of work at the relation's gate point |
| the three keys | the bond key (owns the bond, never on a mining machine); the signing key (signs templates; rotated by the bond key); the account (receives payouts, holds no authority) |
| the keyed rounds | 2 per attempt, in the genesis rule (launch gate L5) |
| the pooling form | chain-native shares: 400 per block, up to four blocks carried, three quarters of the subsidy paid pro rata over the carried shares, each share's payout a list of at most 256 entries, one hash of the relation to verify a share; a stale or duplicate share makes the block invalid |
| activation | height 0; no activation field |
The genesis form: the thin period
A rule live from block one meets a chain with no bond. At height 0 nothing is bonded and the table is empty; the earliest bonds are posted from mined rewards and enter the table two epochs after they post. While the bond is under the floor, units are priced off the floor, so an early bonder holding a fraction of the floor holds that fraction of the units and never all of them; the heights it is not drawn for fall through the round clock to the unbonded round, where any signer seals. At genesis the chain runs as proof of work with a signature at the schedule's full speed; as units appear the open round moves down; once the bond reaches the floor the clock is the draft's.
The early-concentration guard, in two terms read from chain state: the cap (no key holds more than a quarter of the larger of the bond and the floor) and the floor (one early bonder never becomes the sole signer). What it does not do: it is per key, and a party with four keys holds four quarters. Closure row C2 measures what that looks like on the chain.
The thirty-day diagnostic, never a trigger
Over the trailing thirty days (129,600 blocks at the 20-second block), each node computes the same number: the weighted accepted work per registered key, the largest key's share, the top-eight keys' share, and in the thin period the largest key's share of signed heights. It is written in state and served on the feed from block one, read-only.
What it measures: payout keys, never hardware suppliers. What it misses, stated: one supplier split across keys, working through pools, or withholding enough to sit under any line. Splitting and withholding are detectable by inspection, not prevented, and never read as a supplier's share. The auditor rejected a share-based trigger on exactly this ground: "Registered miner identities measure payout identities, not hardware suppliers; one supplier can split keys, work through pools or withhold enough work to remain below 25%." The diagnostic moves nothing and fires nothing. Its prototype on the development chains is on Verify it yourself.
What the rule binds and what it leaves
Binds, by rule: who may sign a block at a height; what an unbonded share worker can change in a signed template (the nonce and nothing else; any other change invalidates its work); where the reward goes; which parent a block extends; hostile claims, priced in bond, and the equivocation penalty once its consensus form passes its gate; liveness; attribution of work to registered keys.
Leaves, stated: hash share (the hasher with the least cost wins the hashing market); custody (a party holding many keys is many units); the off-chain sale or bribe, visible as blocks by many keys from one place, which the chain cannot tell from many holders; a newcomer with no bond, who is a hash provider paid at the hash's marginal cost until it buys bond; the machine-sale route, which is the relation's business and no rule's. Whether what it binds survives an outsourcing contract, key splitting and a pool that holds keys is exactly C1 to C3.
What a failure after genesis does
The rule is live; nothing is postponed. A deterministic consensus or liveness failure found after genesis (two independent builds disagreeing on a block under the rule, or no block within the clock's bound at a height) is a consensus fault handled as any other: a fix row under the lifecycle with the block hash and both verdicts on the record. Never a supplier-share estimate, never a signed word, never a market, price, hashrate or pool reading. The selection contract refuses a row citing anything else.
Where it is written
The launch text (the frozen rule, the genesis form, the launch gates), the three drafts of the rule (the sortition-gated rule, the hostile-key binding, the chain-native share), the prototype's record, the pool's design and the auditor's amendment ruling. Each is linked from this page the day its public URL is named.